Good Examples and Horrible Warnings

[branchandroot]

So the latest wave of Racefail, centering around Wrede’s new novel and currently being documented by naraht, has led one of my favorite authors to leave the virtual house without her pants. I am appalled that Bujold has let herself do this. To be sure, racial issues have never been one of her strengths. Ethnic and national issues, yes, but everyone in her books tends to be white. Except when they’re heretical invaders who are especially repressive of women and queer people, which, um… yeah, not a shining moment given the isolation in which it stands.

Contemplating this, however, made me think about a few white authors who did manage to get something right and keep their awareness live. And I wanted to document them as examples and possibly useful starting points for authors who wish to likewise learn to keep their pants up. I am in no way suggesting that any of them Got It Right, since I don’t think any author ever manages that on any issue, but these are a few who got something right.

There's Barbara Hambly. Her Benjamin January novels, set in post-Revolutionary New Orleans and environs deals well with the wildly complicated social hierarchies surrounding slavery, race, skin color, freedom, sexuality and cultural background in that place and time. In a way, it probably helps that one of her genres is horror, because she can give that full play when dealing with the horrifying aspects of race relations. Similarly, in Patriot Hearts, her novel about the first four First Ladies, when she writes of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, she deals head-on with the double standard that Jefferson lived as a political proponent of freedom and as a plantation owner who enslaved other human beings, including the mother of some of his children. Hambly herself does not assume she has done a perfect job with these issues, which shows a reasonable ongoing awareness.

Another author who comes to mind is David Weber. In Weber's case, I think he did a good job with a different angle. He has envisioned a future world in which race and gender are, in most of his created world/nations, no longer much of an issue. His characters are of decently varied racial and national extraction; his heroine, Honor, is, by current standards, mixed race. These are not major standards by which most cultures evaluate a person anymore, though; instead they are presented as somewhat similar to a person's accent--a sometime cue to their planet of origin. Planetary origin can be a source of discrimination or hostility, but this is not, happily, arranged along racially loaded lines. That took some attention to detail, which is exactly what any author should be giving to her or his work.

This does not, however, mean that everything is pink, fluffy bunnies, and this is another way I think he does well. Bigotry and prejudice are alive and well; there are plenty of groups who are discriminated against in Weber's future universe. The base problem has not simply been erased. Humans have not miraculously fixed themselves just because the focus has changed. And sometimes he gives us a character with enough in-universe historical acumen to make explicit comparisons between the now outmoded forms of discrimination and the new ones, and point out that both are equally non-sensical.

Jo Clayton (not to be confused with Jo Walton) is especially good at writing about the ways race and class can become intertwined. Part of the dramatic tension in her stories is always made up of the conflict between privileged and non-privileged groups, and the axes of privilege in her stories are realistically tangled among issues of gender, race, class, religion. She has a good touch with showing the ways in which those issues shift over time, too, when she has a character like Brann who lives long enough to see one privileged racial/national group be superseded by another.


So what about you? Are there any authors you would point to who get something right?